Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. For much of the past year, this column has taken a hard look at many aspects of District life, from crime and schools, to transportation planning and development, to the uneven distribution of growth in the city, and found them wanting. It’s never difficult to be critical of the way things are done in the District, and yet there are obviously many…

Good morning, Washington. It’s hot again out there today, with highs expected in the upper 90s, and folks in the city are understandably getting a little hot under the collar. Take Duane Stillions, who ABC7 reports was attacked by a pit bull on July 4 while walking his two small dogs. One of his dogs, Molly, a ten-pound Bichon Frise, is hospitalized in intensive care at a cost of $1,000 a day, and Stillions is…

I was surprised to see a man as liberal as Matt Yglesias argue that expanding the size of the Metropolitan Police Department from its current 3,800 officers to the proposed 5,100 would effectively help decrease crime in the District. I suppose I rarely expect liberals to be on the side of such dramatic increases in police power, given that militarizing a city or country doesn’t often track well with pacifying it. Last week Matt claimed…

It wasn’t long ago that we were concerned about a crime resurgence in the District, or a troubling increase in Washington homicides. But while a number of high profile crimes, including some well-publicized Northwest murders, have fueled anxiety among some D.C. residents, crime statistics from the MPD continue to indicate that 2006 could be a banner year for crime reduction in the city. Through today, there have been 48 homicides in the District in 2006,…

Over the last few months, a number of people have found ways to plug the District’s criminal incident reports into online mapping programs, allowing us a visual snapshot of criminal activity from area to the next. First came incidentlog.com, followed closely thereafter by Post’s own crime map. Today our friends at Gallery Place Living tipped us off to a new crime map they’ve introduced, this one mixing weekly incident reports from Crimereports.com and the usual…

Back in January, we thought 2006 might be an ugly year for criminal activity in the District. By February, some of the worst trends had moderated, but homicides in the city were still disturbingly high. Three months into the year, it now seems that crime in 2006 will continue its ten year downward trend, and it also appears that the type of criminal activity seen in D.C. is fundamentally shifting. March was an extraordinarily…

We’ve done our best here to keep you well apprised of crime trends in the District as they show up in the statistics. Each month, we go over the PSA data the MPD publishes, and we don’t doubt that you all carefully pore over our written analyses. There’s something to be said for the visual, however, especially when one is trying to explain where one crooked neighborhood ends and another begins. The visual element of…